Most of what goes wrong in a backyard flock starts as a question somebody answered with a guess. Is this egg still good? Can they have the leftover avocado? How big does the coop really need to be for eight hens? When will that clutch hatch, and when do I stop turning them? These free tools answer one of those questions each, from your own numbers, in a few seconds. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to install, and they work on a phone in one hand while the other is full of feed scoop.
Checkers & Finders
One thing in your hand — an egg, a scrap, a breed — and a straight answer about it.
- Egg Float Test & Freshness CheckerWhat the float test really measures, and how long your eggs keep — washed or not.
- Can Chickens Eat It? Food CheckerType the scrap in your hand: safe, in moderation, only prepared, or never — and why.
- Chicken Breed Finder & ComparerFilter breeds by what you want, or put any two side by side — with every hatchery’s figure.
Flock Calculators
Numbers in, an answer out: coop and run size, how many eggs, when they hatch.
- Chicken Coop, Run & Roost Size CalculatorCoop floor, run, nest boxes and roost length for your flock — three official answers.
- Egg Production CalculatorEggs a week and a year for your flock — and how many hens for a dozen a week.
- Egg Incubation & Hatch Date CalculatorHatch date, candling days, lockdown and the right humidity — for thirteen species.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure here is quoted from whoever published it, with the date I last checked it printed next to the answer. Egg safety comes from the USDA and from university extension services that run backyard-flock programmes. Coop space and incubation come from extension publications written by poultry scientists. Breed figures come from the hatcheries that publish them, each one named, because they do not agree. Nothing is invented, and nothing is dressed up to look more precise than it is.
Where the official answers disagree, you see both
This surprised me when I started checking. The USDA says raw eggs keep three to five weeks in the fridge; one extension service says unwashed backyard eggs keep two to three months. Penn State’s coop table allows one and a half square feet per hen indoors; Oregon State says three. Two publications from the same university give opposite advice on incubator humidity at hatch time. Most pages quietly pick one and print it as fact. These tools print both, say who said which, and leave the choice with you — because an average of two official answers is a number nobody actually recommended.
Where a tool stops
I keep chickens; I am not a vet. None of these tools diagnoses a sick bird, and none of them will tell you a dose of anything. If a hen is off her food, fluffed up in a corner, or you think she has eaten something she should not have, ring an avian vet rather than working from a web page — including this one. The tools are for the everyday questions: space, food, eggs, dates.
Share an answer, or keep it
Every result has its own link. Copy link saves exactly what you entered, so you can send a coop plan to whoever is doing the building, or keep your hatch dates on your phone without writing them on the wall of the shed.
Put a tool on your own site
Every tool has an Embed button. It gives you a short piece of code to paste into a page, a club newsletter, a 4-H resources page or a feed store’s website. The tool works there exactly as it does here, free, with a credit line linking back.
More from the site
The tools answer the quick questions. For the longer ones — what a breed is really like to keep, what goes wrong in a first winter, and a couple of hundred answers to “can chickens eat…?” — start with the latest posts.